How The Emazing Group Uses Shopify Plus to Power Its SEO & Increase Revenue 227%

Consider the anguish you’d feel if you offered the best products in your space but no one could find them in an online search. The kind of products that earn Shark Tank investments from Mark Cuban and Daymond John and actually save lives.

It’s nothing less than ecommerce heartbreak…

But it’s exactly what Katie Knoll, the Digital Marketing Manager at The Emazing Group, felt. Through no fault of her own, the light gloves, LED toys, and lifestyle apparel she sells under several brands routinely lost their top organic Google search rankings for important keywords.

“We lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in a year,” Knoll says. “Our rankings would fluctuate from one week to the next. It was a terribly volatile environment to try to run any SEO strategy.”

Katie Knoll, Digital Marketing Manager, The Emazing Group

It was a bitter pill to swallow…

Especially when you consider that Knoll and her team were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to the very entity responsible for The Emazing Group’s SEO problems.

Bra-Killing Backend Chaos

Knoll was really proud of her bra…

Well, not her bra per say, but the popular sequin bra she marketed via the iHeartRaves site that held the hard earned top organic search result on Google. It was one of the brand’s top selling products until Knoll says Magento, the ecommerce platform for iHeartraves, cost the product its top spot and and an untold number of sales.

Specifically, Knoll says Magento would randomly change the URLs for The Emazing Group’s products which caused its brands to lose hard earned backlinks and drop dramatically in Google’s search results.

“The problem just became worse over time and we would have never been able to scale our SEO strategy if we wanted to continue using Magento,” Knoll says. “We lost a lot of money thanks to Magento’s backend chaos.”

Even worse, the always changing URLs caused The Emazing Group’s search results for top keywords to fluctuate dramatically. Knoll says the company’s search rankings would spike fifty spots one week and plunge fifty spots the next. In the meantime, the company says competitors seized the opportunity, which cost The Emazing Group six figures in lost sales.

“We couldn’t reach new customers or scale our business through that channel which left a hole in our digital strategy and allowed our competitors to come in and scoop up our sales,” Knoll says. “And Magento’s clunky coding made it an awful experience for Google crawlers and customers alike.”

The SEO issues Knoll experienced with iHeartRaves were similar to those she experienced with Emazing Lights, another of the company’s brands on the Magento platform. It was nearly impossible, according to Knoll, to execute an effective SEO strategy.

That is until she noticed something peculiar…

The group’s third brand, INTO THE AM wasn’t experiencing the same SEO struggles. In fact, the brand’s organic search traffic was growing with just basic SEO optimizations.

What was so different for this brand?

Literally more than a million 404 error pages was all…

How to Flirt With Google

It was a massive SEO hole to climb out of…

The Emazing Group found itself with more than 650,000 "not found 404" pages for each of the company’s sites. Since most of the 404 errors, according to Knoll, were a direct result of Magento's re-indexing urls and long strings of jumbled filtering urls, Knoll and her team were desperate for a solution that would allow them to reclaim their top spots on the organic search mountain.

The INTO THE AM brand was performing much better and was the only brand powered by the Shopify Plus platform. It’s one reason, along with a Magento meltdown of epic proportions, that The Emazing Group migrated its other two brands to Shopify Plus.

“On Magento, it was not possible for us to do any work on SEO strategy so replatforming was huge for us,” Knoll says. “We were able to do all the SEO optimizations in-house and finally start cleaning up our website.”

Knoll acknowledges she did have some help thanks to Plus’ ability to easily integrate with third party systems and tools. With help from Traffic Control, a Plus integration that allows merchants to automatically generate unlimited redirects, Knoll and her team were able to fix years of “404 error pages” in just six months. Afterward, The Emazing Group says Plus made it relatively easy to optimize for page titles, meta descriptions, SEO friendly urls, and a solid internal linking structure.

Impressive as it all is…

Knoll still had to accomplish something a bit more personal for the iHeartRaves brand; pushing up that sequin rave dance bra that had been sagging.

A $98,000 One Month Increase

It didn’t happen immediately…

But Knoll and her team’s hard work on Shopify Plus did pay off relatively soon after replatforming. “After being on Shopify for about 9 months, we started to see enormous increases in organic traffic,” Knoll says.

In fact, since replatforming, The Emazing Group credits Shopify Plus with helping it significantly increase organic search traffic. Even more important, Knoll says the company’s SEO strategy has resulted a material spike in sales. Following its move to Shopify Plus, The Emazing Group posted the following results:

A 31% YOY increase in organic traffic over a recent six month period at its EmazingLights brand

A 130% YOY increase in organic traffic and a 22.59% increase in conversion rates which culminated in a 227% increase in revenue, or $98,000, for the month of October 2016 at its iHeartRaves brand

Even better, a recent search for “sequin bra” resulted in iHeartRaves reclaiming the top ranking organic search spot. In fact, the iHeartRaves sequin bra held the top two organic search spots on Google meaning a one time top seller is now positioned to be so once again.

“The impact that Shopify had on our SEO strategies was ground-breaking,” Knoll says. “We could have never achieved such results with Magento. We were able to lock down top spots for some of our most valuable keywords, bringing in new customers and more revenue than ever before. We would have never been able to scale without Shopify!”

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About the Author

Nick Winkler is a contributor to the Shopify Plus blog and founder of The Winkler Group, a strategic communications firm that provides content marketing services to the world's best-known brands, businesses, and marketers. Get more from Nick here.